Harold Tobin

Disclaimer

This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan).

The transcripts of the research project Oral Histories of Scientific Ocean Drilling are polished representations of oral conversations, and are intended solely for the purpose of preserving and documenting personal accounts and memories. They are not a literary product, and are not intended to exhibit literary qualities.

The primary goal of this transcript is to capture the spoken words and memories of the interviewee as accurately as possible. Minor editing and polishing works have been performed to enhance clarity and readability while maintaining the authenticity of spoken discourse, including non-standard grammar, inconsistencies, repetitions, and pauses.

The reader must be aware that memories of an event can vary between individuals and may evolve over time due to various factors, such as subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and personal emotions.

Use and citation

This transcript is the property of JAMSTEC and is subject to its regulations. Quoting, reproducing, or distributing this transcript for non-commercial purposes is allowed with due attribution.

Please cite the interview as:

Interview of Harold Tobin by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2024 March 19, Nachi-Katsuura (Wakayama, Japan). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is March 19 of 2024. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, postdoctoral researcher at JAMSTEC, and I am with Harold Tobin.

Harold Tobin (HT): Hello.

BMR: First of all, can you please say your name, affiliation and current role?

HT: My name is Harold Tobin and I’m at the University of Washington, where I’m a professor in the Earth and Space Sciences Department. Professor of Seismology and Geohazards, that’s the title. I also hold a sort of dual position as director of something called the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which is earthquake science in the northwestern USA.

BMR: Thank you. So, where did you grow up? How was your childhood like?

HT: I grew up on the East Coast of the USA. I grew up near Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, D.C. Suburban kid, you know. But actually, my family background was a little bit more complicated because I lived also while I was a child in Turkey and briefly in Europe, as well. So we had some years in Turkey while I was growing up, and maybe I got a little bit of a sense of a bigger world out there, from all of that. But my junior, high school, years were all in Maryland, and I was not particularly interested in Earth Science or even science. I mean, I liked science, but I was studying other things. So I started university and I expected that my studies would be History or Political Science, something like that. I was an undergrad at Yale University, which is in New England, so still Eastern US. But somehow, I was getting bored with the things that I was studying. And I took one Geology class. Like a lot of people in America, that first Geology class in college, maybe they take it just because they need a little bit of science credit or something. And we went on some field trips and it just seemed so interesting, like you can actually look at the surroundings around you and understand something about how they formed. I never thought about it before, really. But I did like outdoor things like hiking, camping… So maybe it was a fit in some ways, too. While I was an undergraduate student, I had the opportunity when I was 19 years old to do a summer volunteer job at Mount Saint Helens, which is a big volcano in the Cascades, in the west side of the USA. Mount Saint Helens, the volcano had erupted in 1980, so this was 1984, so only a few years later. We were collecting some data for the Forest Service, but wow, it was actual fieldwork, and I was only 19, so it was very exciting. It made me really interested in active margins. I didn’t really even know about subduction yet, but the concept of places where the Earth is more alive than eastern US, really feels… So I finished my undergraduate major in Geology and I moved to the West Coast after my degree because I really loved the landscape of the Western US. But I didn’t go directly to graduate school. I was kind of working for a couple of years and just trying to decide what to do with my life. Anyway, that’s the long part of the story, but I had also done some undergraduate fieldwork as a field assistant to one of my professors in the Olympic Mountains in Washington State, which is actually a subduction accretionary complex. So it was on land geology, but I was really seeing the kind of rocks that actually became my lifelong career pursuit. So then I realized, okay, I wanted to do a Ph.D. and I had to choose between University of Washington versus University of California in Santa Cruz. I went to Santa Cruz. Now I work at Washington. But at that time I didn’t go there.

I started my Ph.D. degree in 1989, and I was thinking that I was interested in studying subduction zones. My mentor there, my supervisor, was Casey Moore, whose name is like very, you know, [well known] from the early days in DSDP and really the first understanding discovery of accretionary wedges and subduction complexes in general, especially in the offshore. So I was interested in studying these subduction zone systems. But then something happened which also really affected my career choice, which is, only three weeks after I arrived in Santa Cruz for graduate study, we had the Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake directly beneath our campus. Basically just in Santa Cruz. It’s one of the biggest earthquakes California has seen in the last 50 years. And it was damaging. I was right on top of it, so I really had that sense… We had so many aftershocks afterwards. And the whole experience of being in a place like that… So I recognized that I wanted to study the geology, but I was really interested in how this translates into dynamic processes like earthquakes, tsunamis, all of those things. But at that time, when I was in graduate school, the world hadn’t had a really big tsunami in a long time. The last magnitude 9 earthquake was in 1964, just before I was born. And, you know, it was long before Sumatra or any of these. So it was kind of unfamiliar topic to a lot of people. But anyway, I got involved pretty quickly in studying the Cascadia Subduction Zone. My first project in graduate school was using the Alvin submarine to dive to basically the seafloor right at the base of the continental slope. So 2.600 meters. We were trying to investigate basically the fluid that was coming out of the seafloor along fault zones, and mapping the faults by using the fluids, and the tubeworms, the clams… The communities that live on these fault bounded fluids. So super interesting. I really enjoyed it.

BMR: Let’s go back some years, how did it happen, that you lived in Turkey and in Europe when you were a kid?

HT: Actually, the first time we moved to Turkey I was only six or nine months old. My father was, when I was born, in the US Army and then he was working for the US government as a translator. They sent him to language school in the Army and he chose Turkish which, I think, nobody ever chose, right? (laughs) But he was interested in that part of the world because he had a cultural interest. So we lived in Ankara, Turkey, from that time until I was three or four years old. And then he came back to the US with the whole family – well, me and my sister, who was born a little later – but he was so interested in Turkey after four years there that he actually quit his job to study for a Ph.D. on the history of the Ottoman Empire. Like a history of the Turkish Empire. So we were living in Princeton when I was an elementary school student. And then he had a Fulbright, so we lived in Istanbul for another year and many adventures having to do with that. I was ten years old living in Istanbul, which was fantastic.

BMR: How was the experience like, as an American kid…?

HT: It was great. I went to a Turkish school, and there was one other American kid, strangely, actually, in the same school. But… I don’t know, I just liked it. It was easy to be just in a different place. I could run around the city as a little kid because things felt safe in those days (laughs). So then we came back to the US, though, and he continued to work for the Federal Government. He was a Middle Eastern expert for his whole career. He passed away, now. So that’s why we had this connection to Turkey. And some of the other stuff was like shorter times in Venice and London, where he was studying something about the history, using the British Archives or whatever it is. So yeah, it was a good experience, I think, to have as a… You know, most American kids don’t hardly ever leave the country because it’s such a big country and you have to go over the ocean to get somewhere else.

BMR: This is a kind of fun and different background.

HT: Yeah, I guess so.

BMR: Maybe it had an influence somehow on your later life?

HT:I think, maybe, it did partly. So the eastern US, as you know, it’s green, it’s sort of forest… It doesn’t have big mountains and things. But I had experienced Anatolia, right? And the mountains, and all of the… I didn’t think of it, of course, as tectonic environment. I knew nothing about geology in those days. Oh, and I forgot to say, also – maybe this is even more important in a way. So I went away for my freshman year, my first year at the university, right at Yale. But then my family, my father, my mother and my sister, moved back to Turkey. He had another four year job there. So I was in the university in the US but I was going for some summer time, the whole summer, Christmas holidays… Things like that. I was flying back and forth to Turkey the whole time. I was like 18, 19, 20 years old. It made me, I think, enjoy the adventure of seeing new cultures, new places, and new landscapes. So maybe all of that fit in. I didn’t even know, that it was going to make me into a geology person or geophysics person. But it did, yeah. So I never experienced any earthquakes or something like that, there. Anyway, that’s the story. And I still love to travel and be in other places outside of the US, although parts of the US are also great.

BMR: You were talking about the (submersible) Alvin. You were diving very early in your career onboard it. How did it happen? Was it common for a graduate student to go in an Alvin dive?

HT: I guess it was… At least, some of them. It wasn’t common because there’s not many Alvin projects, there’s only a few per year. But my advisor, Casey Moore, had gotten a proposal funded to do this study using Alvin in the in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. So we went to sea on the Atlantis 2, which was the ship that held the submarine. We had a group from Oregon State University and Santa Cruz working together. And actually some Germans were there, too. So it was two weeks of cruise time. I think I did two dives in Alvin and then another a year later, I was on another cruise like that. So we did two more dives. Maybe in 1993 or 1992. But at the same time, the planning had been going on for several years for ODP Leg 146, and Leg 146 was Cascadia. Some of the drilling was on the Vancouver Island side and some was in Oregon side. And I was selected to be a shipboard structural geologist for Leg 146. I had some US funding, the Schlanger Fellowship – I think was called a different name, then. So I had some funding. It was part of my PhD funding, and project was first the Alvin and then ocean drilling. By the time I finished my PhD, I had done Leg 146 but also Leg 156, which was Barbados. And we collected a lot of logging data from drilling across the décollement zone (note: a low-friction surface where rock masses slide over each other) in Barbados. So by the time I finished my PhD, I had two Alvin cruises and two ODP cruises finished. Then, I was just sort of off and running. I finished my Ph.D. in Santa Cruz in 1995, and I went to Stanford as a postdoc where I was trying to really learn and understand rock physics better. I was making ultrasonic velocity measurements on samples. The group I was in was very connected to the oil industry, and I was the strange guy doing this tectonics work (laughs) out of that whole group. While I was at Stanford, I went on ODP Leg 170, which was Costa Rica, and that’s it. Actually, I should mention. The co-chief scientists were Gaku Kimura, from Japan, and Eli Silver. Eli Silver was also the UC (University of California) Santa Cruz professor. He’s retired now, but he was also my mentor. I really had two in graduate school that were the key people, who were Casey Moore and Eli Silver. And maybe I should say a third person, also. He was in Hawaii, but Greg Moore was also part of the team I was working with throughout all this time. And I went to visit Greg’s lab in Hawaii and I learned some seismic reflection, analysis techniques, over there… So I worked with all of those guys. Casey Moore and Greg Moore, which we’re not related to each other, right? They just have the same names. People always made jokes about the Moore brothers. Of course there’s also Ted Moore (laughs), there’s a lot of Moore’s in in the ocean drilling world or in just the world.

BMR: Was scientific ocean drilling your first experience in international collaboration?

HT: I would say mostly, yes. I guess the Alvin cruise, like I said, we had some international participants. But I was a very new graduate student, like the youngest guy on board. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention… My first time going to sea – so actually, I have my answers wrong. My first international collaboration was actually on the Charles Darwin, which is a British vessel. I was already accepted for graduate studies in Santa Cruz starting in September. But at the beginning of the summer, before the beginning of my graduate school, Eli Silver called me up. There was no email in those days. And said, “We have a spot for one of my students on this cruise that’s leaving from San Diego, and it’s going to do surveys of the Panama and Colombia margin, like the Pacific side of Panama to Colombia. Would you like to go? You can learn about seismic reflection, and gravity, and magnetics…” And what was it called, GLORIA, It was a sonar imaging, swath bathymetry and imaging, side scan sonar. So I said, “sure.” And I was this young guy who went down to San Diego, I got on a ship, it was like forty British people, I didn’t know, and me (laughs). That was a good experience, a good cruise, and we went to the Panama Canal at the end, and finished in Cartagena. And I was like, “Oh, this is great.” Going to sea is the way to learn something really new about the world. So that convinced me that the Marine Geoscience was a focus, more than being on land, even though I liked the idea of on land geology. But you could do more fundamental things in the ocean because we know so much less, even today and especially back then.

So that’s backtracking now. We’ve established that, I went to sea with the British geophysical crew, and then the Alvin, and then ODP. So I guess I had already been to the sea quite a bit, by that time. And working internationally, ODP was where it really though became a real focus, because I was part of the team. I wasn’t just somebody’s student, but I was there as an independent participant. We had people from all over the world. In those days, on ODP, there was a brief period where there were Russian scientists on every expedition. So we had a couple of Russian guys, Boris [Baranov] and Nickolai [Chamov], and I can’t remember their last names right now, and they were great. They were a lot of fun to talk to and work with. And I formed many other scientific friendships and connections that I still have to this day. Just like Bob Musgrave (Robert J. Musgrave), who’s here at this meeting (IODP3 Meeting, Wakayama, Japan), was the staff scientist on board that expedition. The first one, Leg 146. So yeah, it just was sort of a natural progression.

The next big expedition was after… So I finished a postdoc after two years and I became an assistant professor far from the ocean, in New Mexico. New Mexico Tech is a nice geoscience department in a good university, but in the middle of nowhere, in the desert in New Mexico. Shouldn’t say in the middle of nowhere, somebody will object, Right? (laughs) One of the nice things about how the drilling proposals come together, then and now, is people with different expertise are just communicating with each other, and we sitting around and talking at AGU or at some place. And the next idea for a proposal is developing, and you put it together. So it didn’t matter too much if you were more junior or senior to be involved in these things. We had the first – or not the first – but we had the Nankai Muroto drilling transect, which was ODP Leg 190 and 196. 190 was the main coring expedition, and 196 came later with just LWD (Logging While Drilling) and installing some CORK observatories. I was a participant on, actually, both of those. So that gets us up to about 2001.

BMR: Was that your first contact with the area around Japan?

HT: Yes. The expedition Leg 190 started from Taiwan, and we did the whole 56 days or something at sea. Then we came to Yokohama, at the end. So that’s my first time in either the science around Japan or in being physically in Japan myself.

BMR: How did it happen, that you decided to go to that expedition? What was your scientific interest?

HT: All of those ones, Costa Rica, Barbados, Cascadia, they’re all linked by being accretionary wedges. They are all subduction zones and every one of them we had a target that was trying to understand the fault processes. So, active faults and fluids, and how the fluid, pore pressure, interacted with the fault system, was kind of a theme throughout all of those expeditions. In everyone I was either a shipboard structural geologist or physical properties specialist and increasingly working with the logging data. Because with logging we could get those geophysical measurements across the fault zones. So my overarching theme was, I would almost call it, understanding how faults work. So it was a little bit of geology, a little bit of geophysics, putting it together to get at the physical properties of a fault system, which is different from the wall rock on both sides of the fault and under, and the stress and pore pressure that are part of the environment of a fault. I was not the proponent of it, because I was still too junior, in any of those proposals. But just becoming part of the scientific team, the scientific party… So all of that just felt like a natural progression, but it was a lot of time at sea, in those days. It was at that time when we were doing the Muroto transect, and this drilling of Leg 190, that we were beginning to really talk about – or at least when I was first hearing about – the concept of the seismogenic zone. And, okay, we could drill these shallow holes, maybe up to one kilometer deep to touch just the tip of the fault. But wouldn’t it be good to get deeper and understand, or actually sample and instrument, in faults at seismographic depths? In Japan, they were beginning to develop plans for the Chikyu. So this was at the beginning of IODP. So ODP ended, IODP began in 2003, she (Chikyu) was just under construction.

We had a meeting in the University of Tokyo ORI (Ocean Research Institute) in 2001. It was at the old ORI place, and we were just discussing about, “okay, Nankai Trough seems like a good place to do this seismogenic zone experiment, right?” Which is what the ‘SEIZE’, where the NanTroSEIZE (Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment) concept came from. And there was also discussion about, “Oh, what about Costa Rica, what about other places?” But… Actually, I had jetlag, so I was awake at 3:00 in the morning after the first day of the meeting. And I said, “Oh, I’ll just make some slides to write down some concepts of what a possible drilling proposal should have in it as elements.” And the next day we were at the meeting and somebody who was running the meeting – maybe it was Taira-san, I can’t remember – said, “does anybody have any thoughts on how to move this to a proposal?” Nobody said anything. And I said, “well, I’ve made some slides” (laughs) “at 3:00 in the morning.” So I showed the slides and it was clear then that we could go ahead with this, but also that I would have to do the work (laughs). The guys who were – mostly guys, not all guys, some women involved – who were one level more senior, older than me, were just looking at people my age or they just said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re in charge” (laughs) I said, “What?” Anyway.

BMR: What was the difference, between the studies for earthquake research that you were doing before NanTroSEIZE, and the plan you had for NanTroSEIZE?

HT: The main one was the difference between looking at these very shallow faults [and going deeper]. So we were thinking of them from the perspective of fault systems, but not really from the perspective of earthquakes. Meaning, it was the shallow – you know, earthquakes, especially in those days, we thought, they happened at depth in the Earth, and the shallowest part of the earthquake is maybe five kilometers, and the deeper part is 30 or 40 kilometers. And so this accretionary wedge… It’s funny, we didn’t really connect it to the earthquakes in the same way then that I think we have established now. Many people thought that rupture in an earthquake would come up but stop, kind of die out in the softer sediments and mud. And then the accretionary wedge was just sort of an afterthought, or after slip, or something that was not really part of the earthquake system. So we wanted to go for the deeper drilling, specifically to get high enough temperature, high enough pressure conditions, that we thought we were really in the earthquake zone, the seismogenic zone. And that was the whole concept of the seismogenic zone experiment – we needed to go deeper. That’s the big difference. And going deeper really required the riser ship. At first, nobody thought there could be a riser ship and then, Japan and JAMSTEC said, “we’re going to build one.” And they really did it.

BMR: The planning of NanTroSEIZE was done before Chikyu came on line.

HT: Yeah.

BMR: So you planned on technology that did not exist yet.

HT: Yeah. So the concept came in the late-1990s, as I said. We were writing the first version of the proposal. We submitted the pre-proposal for NanTroSEIZE in, I think, 2001 and maybe it was early 2002. Chikyu was launched in 2003 and wasn’t really completed with the derrick and everything on board for one or two more years after that. So yeah, we were writing the proposal… We knew how the ship was planned, and we knew what the design was, but it didn’t exist yet. That’s true.

BMR: Going back to the organization of NanTroSEIZE. NanTroSEIZE was the first large scale project in ocean drilling, it has been going on for ten years, and its organization started even before. So how its organization developed? All the stages, until the first expedition. Who were the partners and the people involved?

HT: It was recognized that doing such deep drilling and such an ambitious project was going to be very different from a typical, you know, you write a proposal for the [JOIDES] Resolution or, before that, the Glomar Challenger, and you had two months, you just did it, you were finished, next thing. So they actually, somewhere in the IODP review structure or planning structure, they invented a concept they called CDP, Complex Drilling Proposal. So Complex Drilling Proposal meant it was going to take multiple legs or special platforms, new ways to do things that would take longer. And so we knew, of course, that NanTroSEIZE – because we wanted a transect plus one, or actually originally two, very deep holes. So the CDP concept came along. We submitted the pre-proposal; the panels were favorable. They thought the proposal was exciting, but they said, “okay, it needs basically a planning committee.” So it was a new structure in ocean drilling, was to form this special committee that was just to plan out how NanTroSEIZE would go. Once the proposal had gotten far enough along that, it was sort of accepted as a likely high priority. And this is, again, at the same time this ship is being constructed. So I actually was a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellow in Tokyo University in 2003, just for the summer, three months. But we spent a lot of time that summer thinking about what the planning would be. And I guess we were finishing, we ended up with the proposal 603, right? That’s the proposal number, 603 CDP, was the Complex Drilling Proposal. We called it the umbrella. And then we had, you know, 603A, 603B, C and D, different parts of the proposal. 603C was the riser drilling, the first phase of really deep drilling. And we did a lot of planning and writing that summer, and basically the proposals were all finished by about 2004, 2003.

Gaku Kimura and I went to visit the ship in the shipyard where it was being still constructed. The hull was completed, the inside was partly completed. There was no derrick on top. We could walk underneath the ship because it was like sitting on these wooden pallets, it was like dry dock, basically. Somewhere I have photos holding the giant propellers from underneath. It was great. And it’s funny because the pictures are old, too. (laughs) So that’s 20 years ago. We started writing proposals for NanTroSEIZE in 2001 and the last drilling was in 2019. So that’s a long time.

But this Science Planning Committee (SPC) – we changed the name once or twice – but anyway, the thing that became the SPC was meeting two or three times per year. I was coming to Japan really frequently after that. So I had my home life and my university job, but I was getting a lot of frequent flyer miles (laughs) going back and forth. For that planning process, we formed a team that really liked working together. Of course, it had ups and downs, but about Masa Kinoshita and Gaku Kimura were really key, important people in that whole process. Taira was the president of JAMSTEC, so he was doing something higher up. Part of the conception – and Michael Underwood, and Greg Moore, Damian Saffer, were involved… Sanny Saito was another one… So, we just planned it all out and there were all these technical issues that were coming up, like, can they put the riser down in the Kuroshio current? For a really long time, we weren’t sure we were able to drill any of the NanTroSEIZE, because of the sea current situation, and it was really uncertain. But they designed eventually this riser fairing thing, that’s like, a wing that lives on the riser. Maybe you’ve heard about it.

BMR: Taira-san had a rough time with the Kuroshio current.

HT: (laughs) Yeah, that was back from ODP Leg 131, which was a little bit before my time. I think 131 happened even before I was a graduate student, just a little bit, like a year, one or two years. Anyway, so we did the first actual drilling or maybe back up. I had visited the Chikyu one more time in, I think, Nagasaki, and then they had the shakedown drilling, which was Hachinohe and Shimokita (peninsula), northern Honshu. I went to the ship, flew by helicopter on board, during that shakedown cruise. This was probably 2006. You can look it up, I guess. So even during this whole phase, before we ever had a drilling program of NanTroSEIZE, I could get this familiarity with the ship and sense of connection to how it was being constructed. I mean, it was… They talked about the Mohole Project, but really, honestly, we were thinking about it’s being built for the seismogenic zone experiment because that’s where the hazard was in Japan. So there was urgency for that. But also, for big scientific questions.

BMR: Why do you think it was priority for Chikyu? It was the first Chikyu cruise, I think.

HT: Yeah, [IODP] Expedition 314. Masa (Masataka Kinoshita) and I were co-chief scientists on the first Chikyu expedition. Yeah, it was the priority, I think pretty clearly. Two things. In IODP Science Plan, the seismogenic zone was identified as a key priority that there was fundamental science we didn’t understand about how do faults work. Of course, it tied in to society’s hazard, from earthquakes and tsunamis. And we wrote the proposal, we conceived the whole project before the Sumatra December 26, 2004, before the magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami. That really fueled some momentum for this project to come. And in Japan, they identified Nankai Trough as the highest hazard of a future disaster. Now, this was before Tohoku earthquake happened. Even today, Nankai Trough is considered maybe the greatest natural hazard in Japan.

At one of those early meetings, when we were still in the planning stages, I remember Masa Kinoshita asked me, “Harold, you’re from the US, why are you so interested in Nankai Trough? This is our hazard, our problem” kind of thing (laughs). And I said, well I think any scientist would say, “I’m not interested specifically in the Nankai Trough, but I’m interested in understanding these fault mechanics questions.” And it turns out the best place in the world to ask those questions and to do the project is here, is Nankai, because we had more data, because the geometry was just the sweet spot for, you know,  you needed to be 2000 meters water depth for the riser, but you needed to be able to reach a reflection that you were pretty sure it was the real fault and have a target. So it all added up. And Nankai was the best place in the world that we knew about. So I said, “you know, if all those things were true, but it was in Alaska, then I’d have been doing it in Alaska, or the Philippines or whatever, Chile,” it could be in lots of places, but it made sense. And of course, Japan was going to put the money in it. So we wanted to do fundamentally globally exciting science. And it happened to be Nankai. And that continues to be true, right? We’re learning things there. So I said, I’m sure it was much more like joking around as, “Masa, I don’t care about Nankai. I just want to do good science.” (laughs) But that’s the reality of it. And it’s made a good partnership over the years, because NanTroSEIZE turned into 13 expeditions of Chikyu.

 Another thing that maybe has been lost, too, a little bit in the history. So we’ve submitted the proposal. We said, “okay, Chikyu is a riser drillship, so it should just drill riser things. And the JOIDES Resolution is the non-riser drillship. It’s faster for non-riser operations because it’s just it’s optimized more for that.” So the idea was those first expeditions, they were originally scheduled for the JOIDES Resolution, like Expedition 314, 315, 316. That’s the Stage One NanTroSEIZE. Stage One was supposed to be JR (JOIDES Resolution) and Chikyu would come in for Stage Two. And then… I can’t even remember, some budget thing. Anyway, those got canceled or postponed, and then JAMSTEC said, “Oh, we can do this with Chikyu.” So yeah, it was not the original plan, for that to be Chikyu drilling, but it was.

BMR: That’s interesting because you were planning something complex based on riser, riserless, instrumenting the hole… In hindsight, comparing the planning phase and after completing the thirteen expeditions, is there something you would have planned differently?

HT: Yeah, that could have a very long answer (both laugh). There are some things where this is true. We made a plan and looking backwards, it doesn’t make sense. One thing was, I think we were pretty ambitious at the beginning. So some of the first holes we tried were some really difficult drilling conditions, and maybe we should have tried the easy stuff first. In some ways we thought we were doing the easy stuff first, but it turned out not to be so easy. So, you know, Expedition 314 was really tough. We had a lot of trouble drilling some holes… We had a lost drill string where we were logging, LWD drilling, trying to get into the splay fault, and 500 meters below the surface they got stuck. And they snapped it off. So we had a radioactive source in the borehole. They spent a week trying to fish it back out. We knew it wasn’t going to ever come back out, but eventually they had to put cement on top, and it became a very big problem for JAMSTEC. The people on board who knew about, the oil industry people knew that happens sometimes. But, you know, for JAMSTEC, this was new. They didn’t have a drillship before this.

But to go back to your question, yeah, we should have really started with just the simplest drilling we could think of and make sure that the ship got smooth operations built up, before we tried anything super challenging. There were some things where actually the Planning Committee said, “if you’re going to do riser drilling, you have to use these planning techniques that come from the oil industry.” And that didn’t happen for budget reasons or because whatever. JAMSTEC wasn’t part of that offshore oil industry world. So they did things their own way. Some of those, we kind of knew even at the time, “this could be difficult,” “maybe we should be doing this differently.” But political reality was different.

But anyway, the point is that drilling conditions were more difficult than we expected. I think if we had known at the beginning how many years it would take… Well, first of all, I might have never started (laughs), I might have gone somewhere else (laughs). We did part of its hole C0002, the big riser hole. And then we couldn’t get the funds to come back for three or four years and reenter the same hole. It’s a long time in between. You lose some of that capability, some of the technical people come and go… Maybe the hole even is aging, literally just sitting there. So there’s times when I wish we would have been able to just continuously do it. Just one big push. But of course, that was impossible. We worked with what resource was available, always.

BMR: Chikyu had been funded for thirteen expeditions. That’s a lot.

HT: It is, right.

BMR: At that moment, did you envision that the funding for Chikyu would be…?

HT: No, no way. One interesting thing, though is… We expected we would do the riserless drilling with a different ship, and riser only [with Chikyu]. There was an estimate made very early, like in 2004. If we wanted to drill to five or seven kilometers, how many days of drilling will it take? And I think the estimate that was made was… I remember 450 or 500 days of drilling operation. And even after all these expeditions, if you add up how much time we have spent at site C0002, it’s just about that same number. So we had all these problems, but really we’re actually – people think it extended so much, but in a way it’s the same number of days they were predicting from the very beginning. So maybe everybody needed to understand how complicated and ambitious this was. Including me, sometimes. And that it wasn’t going to happen fast or go easy. And we didn’t get everything done that we wanted to, right? We don’t have… Hole C0002 is not as deep as we need it to be – that’s why Masa is still pushing to propose more. But, you can also say that of these thirteen expeditions, and all the different drill sites that were cored and studied, all the borehole observatories, all the downhole measurements… We have learned more about these subduction processes from the NanTroSEIZE transect than anywhere else in the world. It is the leading study area for what happens in a subduction zone that has strong locking and strong earthquakes. We know more about it than anywhere else. So it’s been a huge scientific advance doing it, even without reaching all of our objectives. I feel that’s really true. And at the end of the expedition 348 or 358, we were very frustrated because it was so difficult and things didn’t go according to the plan. But then, after a little, time goes by and you look back, “okay, what did we actually learn from NanTroSEIZE?” And it’s huge. We learned a great deal at the time. So I think it’s been a worthwhile project. But I think recognizing that a new technology, a new ship, new people to operate it, the very first time no one can expect it to be smooth all the time (laughs).

BMR: The first time you were co-chief scientist of scientific ocean drilling was onboard Chikyu. How was the experience like? How was it different from previous experiences as a participant?

HT: Hugely different. I mean, as a participant, obviously you’re invested in the project, but you have your job and you do your job, you do your shift. And on Chikyu… Everybody was new, everybody was nervous. We went to sea. It’s the first time for the JAMSTEC drilling team to work with scientists, to do this project. The ship is basically new still, at that point… We were nervous because we wanted it to go well… So there was a lot of just learning how to communicate with each other. We had meetings, Masa and I were the co-chiefs on that first expedition, and we had daily meetings with the people from the different parts of the drilling team. We had a leadership meeting on board and I was just, both nervous but also really wanted everything to go well, and just… I feel like we were always trying so hard. I don’t think I slept very much in two months (laughs), because any time of day there could be something going on, “okay, just wake me up, I’ll come.” It seems like it was 2 hours sleeps, pretty much, for two months. But it was also very… I had never been chief scientist of anything until that time, on other ocean drilling or other kinds of cruises. So having the science party that – we had to manage also the personalities in the scientists’ group, which were coming from many different countries. People were great. It was really very satisfying to have all these very smart, good, dedicated scientists who were out there, and they were going through it along with me, the ups and the downs. And it was a support group, at the same time (laughs). It was just like one of these intense life experiences where you’re really, like everything, you’re just trying to do something and you’re trying to learn how to do it with a lot of other people. It’s not like climbing a mountain, where you’re kind of depending on yourself, or maybe one or two partners. It’s like climbing a mountain with 50 people or 125 people (laughs). All tied together on a rope, exactly. So it was – in your life, sometimes six months can go by, nothing special happens. So it feels like no time. But then, that two months is like I can remember every other day, so many details of it.

BMR: So the 13 expeditions of NanTroSEIZE had different co-chief scientists, you were not a co-chief of all of them. How did you organize that?

HT: I was not in all of them, and of course I was not onboard for every one, also.We developed this concept that has only really applied to NanTroSEIZE in the whole history of scientific ocean drilling. Masa (Kinoshita) and I became given the title, Chief Project Scientist. Chief Project Scientist meant that we were sort of chiefs of NanTroSEIZE, but there still could be an expedition going on with completely different people on board the ship being the co-chief, and it was all tied together by the continuation of this SPC, the Planning Committee. So year by year, we were just continuing on. Many different people became on board co-chiefs and expedition project managers, EPM. We had the concept of holding it all together with the Chief Project Scientists. So we did that. And we had to select co-chiefs or… With all the input from the different countries, and the balance of, you know, a certain number of Japanese, US, Europe… We had a good pool of people, always, to choose from. So I’m sure not every co-chief completely knew what they were doing at all times (laughs), but they were really good. It’s been a really good team. And, of course, these are people that now, I and others, we’ve worked together for a decade or two decades. So people getting to know each other.

BMR: You were co-chief in expeditions 314, 326, 348 and 358.

HT: I guess so, sounds good (laughs) 326 was kind of a fake [co-Chief Scientist role] because it was an engineering only leg. Basically, the ship went out to start the C0002 riser hole. So we only drilled a few hundred meters, put in casing, BOP (Blow Out Preventer)… There was no science, it was all engineering. Masa and I – and I feel like somebody else – we were co-chiefs on board because we needed to have a science sort of representative to make decisions. But we didn’t have any science party. So it was actually very different. And I was only there for 25 days, or something. I can’t remember exactly. But anyway, yes, I’ve been co-chief on all these other ones.

BMR: I’d like to ask you about the biggest technical problem with operations in NanTroSEIZE, in Expedition 358. What happened there? What kind of decisions were made that maybe could have been different, or what things were just unexpected?

HT: That borehole had come from – I mean, (Expedition) 326 is when it was started, but in (Expedition) 338 and then (Expedition) 348 we tried to advance the hole. It always had to be drilled in stages. One or two thousand meters, and install the steel pipe casing, and then another thousand meters, install the casing again. So there had already been problems in the borehole. And there had already been one place where they had to put cement in the bottom and do what they call a sidetrack, where they drill out the side of the steel casing and then keep going, and keep the hole advancing. And these are all techniques – you know, I mean, I’m a geoscientist. I had to learn just to understand what was going on. I had to learn something about borehole engineering (laughs), well design, and the things that people who drill holes for their job know all about and go to school for… So I’ve learned about all that stuff, but that doesn’t mean I’m an expert in it, either. So anything I answer is my view as a geoscientist who has spent a lot of time on drilling operations, not as a drilling engineer.

So that borehole, each time… (Expedition) 358 was very frustrating because, of course, we already had a 3000 meter borehole. The bottom was a mess. It had been drilled and partially collapsed. So it was not possible to just keep going down. We had to drill a sidetrack. I think when they started the sidetrack and established it, it was creating some kind of bending of the pipe, and some friction. There were many theories about what was going on. It’s a complicated story where maybe the previous casing was not cemented as perfectly as it should have been. It had gaps in the cement. So the formation was fractured and unstable, so it is hard to get established in it. The fluids are circulating, but being lost, and the subsurface conditions were really hard. But I think what we didn’t really understand until the end of 358 was that the already complicated borehole, just to get to where we were drilling, was causing trouble because, you know, maybe when they tried to put weight on the bit to drill the hole, they couldn’t really, truly get the weight to the bit. It was catching on all these places along the way. So we tried a sidetrack. We made 50 meters or 100 meters and then stuck or unable to advance. Can still turn the pipe, but can’t actually make it go ahead. And they would try and try, and then pull back, eventually give up on that. And so we’d have to make a new sidetrack and… Some of them were just like, you’re just trying, but you’re not making headway. So you pull out. And then, we would just have bad luck. We finally got one in. We had this special expandable casing, and then something… I’m trying to remember the exact thing that happened… But anyway, some part of it became stuck that was not supposed to be stuck, just in the way the casing attaches to itself. And so we had one kind of bad luck combined with a different kind of bad luck, because it’s a difficult environment. So it was one time after another, and it felt like we were just like, you bang your head on the wall expecting the door to open, but it just keeps – you just keep banging it (laughs) and when we did get stuck, one time, they had this… Again, what was it? A tool got stuck in the bottom of the hole, so they had to go fishing, they call it. They send something down on the inside, try to pull it out. For me, as the chief scientist, my gut feeling was like, “this isn’t working. They’ll never going to get it back. This is truly stuck.” But maybe because of protocols or something, they had to fish for seven days. So we were sitting there. Seven days. Bang, bang, bang… Just like, slamming on it, but knowing that it was not going to succeed. And maybe the engineers would think this is a different story, maybe they will hate me for saying it this way (laughs). We had to learn how to understand and talk to each other, also.

Anyways, so I think that what went wrong on 368 was that we kept trying to recover and do a little increment of the same thing, when really we had a bigger problem that we were not recognizing that it was big enough that needed to reset the whole plan. And part of it is that, once they are committed to an expedition, it’s hard to say, “forget it, we are going home.” Because we still had a hundred days on schedule, or something like that. And the money, it doesn’t just… We are not an oil company, you can’t just say, “okay, forget it, we’ll do this, come back the next year and do that.” That’s not how it works in a scientific organization. So all of that was like, maybe sometimes we were trying so hard doing the same thing, instead of developing a new plan on the spot. If I had, in hindsight, to do differently, I would say we’d be more capable of really resetting and trying the whole new plan.

The other thing I was going to say was, from the beginning, from Expedition 314 and including all the riser expeditions, I think the scientists and the drilling engineers really had to learn how to talk to each other. First of all just understand each other, because we’re coming at the questions from a very different place. And then to understand that, yeah, things go good some days, things go bad some days. You roll with it. And you had to become friends in a way. And it got much better once we were friends. All those meetings, all those dinners sometimes after the meetings – not onboard the ship, I mean, but in all those planning meetings. It was actually really important to develop some personal connection that gave us trust. And it wasn’t always easy, like, Nobu (Eguchi) can tell you stories – has probably tons of stories. (Ikuo) Sawada-san and I… It took a while for us to learn that we can work together, in the beginning.

BMR: In what sense was this disconnection?

HT: I think he thought, “what are these scientists even doing here? My job is to drill this hole. Just leave me alone.” My attitude, and coming from the world of scientific drilling and the JR, in which I hadn’t been a co-chief but I had been around the operations a lot, was like, the whole drilling is directly for the science, and decisions we make about the hole affect which science we can do or not do, and which things we can emphasize. So, I would have a lot of questions for them, and I would like to know the detail of what was happening in the drilling because it mattered, to me, to understand what we could or couldn’t do with the science. Like downhole stress measurement or something like that… To him it was like, “why are this scientists bothering me?” (laughs) And I understand that, because really, in the world of that kind of offshore work, there’s nobody like that. And we were asking for weird things. We always wanted to maximize some science thing we wanted to do… Maybe from their perspective, and probably it was true from their perspective, was actually making a higher risk for the borehole of just being completed. But what we learned along the way was that we shared the same goal, which was completing that borehole, get the objective done. And I think that once we learned to do that, and once we learned that each one could be angry and pissed off one day, not because it was personal but just because things were frustrating, and then come back the next day and say, “okay, now we are making it better.” So, ups and downs. It’s like family life offshore (laughs).

BMR: It has also the component of living together in a limited space for a long time, so you cannot be pissed off during two months with the same person, every day.

HT: Yeah, you still have to sit next to them every day at breakfast. It’s good and bad. I mean, any scientific expedition puts people together in a very close environment. You could be doing fieldwork in the mountains and is the same thing, that you are camping together. When you go on a ship, you might be with the same people 12, 14, 16 hours a day for many weeks, and you can’t go away. You don’t see anybody else. So it magnifies everything. It means that some of my life-long friendships are from people I’ve been at sea with. And some of the people that I don’t want to talk to (laughs) are people I’ve been at sea with. In a different way, it’s one of the unique things of expeditions science or field science. It’s like we got to know each other really, really well. And I think that if your job is economics or something, that never happens to you, right? You’re just in the office.

BMR: It also depends on the kind of scientific cooperation. You can be cooperating in CERN or a big telescope and you don’t have this close interaction, 24 hours a day. So this is something kind of unique of scientific ocean drilling.

HT: Yeah, exactly. Maybe not only ocean drilling, but any kind of oceanographic science. I’ve really valued it, too, because when you go offshore, your world can become very simple, in a way. You’re focused on the science. Your life is lived in a super simple way. You have a little room like a monk in the cell, somebody else is cooking your food, somebody else is washing your clothes, and you don’t think about anything. You can’t go anywhere. And you end up just doing a project. And that can be fantastic. That’s one of the very rewarding parts. I don’t know if you’ve gone out to sea, but yeah, a good part about doing all of that stuff is that you get to make everything else go away, a little bit. It’s harder than it used to be. When I was going to sea in the early days, we had communication with the shore but it was like not much. We would get very simple text emails, maybe one time per day. And now you can make a FaceTime phone call, it’s like really different. I kind of liked the days, in some ways, when you were out of touch, mostly. You can make a radio call or a phone call, but they had to charge you money. When I was first going on the JOIDES Resolution, if I wanted to call my wife, it was $10 a minute (laughs) or something like that. I won’t say I miss it because it’s kind of nice to be in touch, but in those days I could just say “my email, for two months, forget it. I’m not going to touch it,” you know? Now I can’t do that (laughs).

BMR: Going back to (Expedition) 358. That was the last expedition of the decade-long row of expeditions. What was the feeling for you, when finishing this whole project in this way?

HT: Honestly speaking, the feeling wasn’t that good, because we didn’t really finish it, right? We wanted to reach some objective or at least be able to say, “okay, we came out of (Expedition) 358, maybe we didn’t finish our objective, but we drilled a whole new section, we have new data…” But we came off of 358 feeling like, “okay, we got nothing.” We only, I think, we advanced the total depth by one or two hundred meters, but we didn’t get any core from that zone, we didn’t get any new logs from that zone. So, in a way, it doesn’t really count. And we really felt like, “okay, this project got a lot in NanTroSEIZE, but on this Expedition 358, we just tried and didn’t make new scientific discoveries.” And of course there are some papers, and people are writing based on the cuttings that they analyzed, or the cores that we did get shallower. So I don’t want to say it’s only terrible, but at the end of that expedition I was not feeling very happy about it. And, you know, wanted another chance, basically – or to walk away, I guess (laughs). But wanted another chance to have that borehole go better.

BMR: What are the learnings or the positive parts of the expedition?

HT: Uhm (laughs). I don’t know, learning that people could remain actually more positive than you might expect, in the face of all of that. And you can see a video of me talking at the end of the cruise and I’m still smiling at that point, so (laughs). So that’s good, smiling in the face of some kind of adversity and things that don’t go right. I mean, we definitely learned something philosophical, which is trying big, risky things, means that sometimes they don’t work. That… And just, even with all of that being out there at sea, again, focused 24 hours a day with this really great group of scientists, who had very good ideas and interesting… So just the conversations and the people, and the science that we could be talking about, even if we weren’t always making new progress in our drilling part of the project. Those were all good. But, you know, you can ask me about earlier expeditions where I can say a lot more about, “Oh, I left the ship feeling like, wow, we’ve got it,” or energized, “We’ve accomplished a lot.” (Expedition) 314, the first expedition, we had trouble, for sure, during that expedition, but at the end we’re like, “Wow, look how much we did,” you know? So (Expedition) 358, we couldn’t say the same thing.

BMR: So please tell me about it. Of course NanTroSEIZE was a successful series of expeditions, so what do you think were the most important outcomes?

HT: There’s a lot, but the key ones… First of all, in this geological story, we really, I think, by having the 3D seismic data and then the drilling that allowed us to get the materials and the ages, geological dates from these different settings showed us that the accretionary wedge has grown not just continuously. Like evolution in steps, and big changes happening over relatively short geological times, with maybe a million years in between, sometimes. So understanding the episodic nature of the growth of the accretionary wedge is important, understanding the stress condition that was present in the wedge and was not what our expectation was, where we saw all this evidence of extensional stresses above the fault zone, and where we expected compressional, and understanding why as time goes by… The work that was done by lots of really good people on the fault rocks, so the cores themselves, and showing that the faults were concentrated, discrete zones even in the shallow subsurface, and that there was great evidence of seismic rupture coming all the way to the surface. That was before Tohoku [earthquake], which we recognized quickly in Tohoku that the slip had gone all the way to the surface. But before that, it was very controversial to even say that the slip would go to the surface, which matters a lot for things like the tsunami source. And we were getting it from NanTroSEIZE, also. So those some really key big surprises, but also key results that came out of the expedition.

The one that I think is the real NanTroSEIZE legacy, and ultimately, the most important science from it, is from the long-term borehole observatories. So the monitoring system, which now we have three really amazing boreholes with instrumentation in them. And we’re seeing the pulsing of these slow slip events with pore pressure, and the link to the tectonic tremor, and strain accumulation. And it was always the plan for NanTroSEIZE, it was that long-term monitoring was the key goal, more than just collecting core samples or collecting logging data. So, of course, I wish we had monitoring also deep in the fault zone, deeper, at the bottom of [Expedition] 358, we don’t have that. But the monitoring we do have is really fantastic and producing great results. (Eiichiro) Araki-san, Demian Saffer… Different people are writing really good analysis papers about that stuff.

BMR: What do you expect for the future of these kind of studies in scientific offshore drilling?

HT: Well, we’re still trying to push for observatories in more places than just Nankai. So Nankai is important but now, comparing to other subduction zones, which is why we have this proposal for Cascadia, now. More drilling into active fault systems, the Japan Trench, J-Fast, and now the upcoming Expedition 405, J-Track… So that we can really understand what the materials are inside these faults, in places where we know they slipped, or know what happened. Those are future for subduction zone drilling. Putting in observatories is a lot more expensive than just coring, so I’m always worried about, can we keep the momentum? Can we keep the program funding in these really important things that cost more, like observatories? But here at this meeting, there’s people expressing interest in that. So I hope that continues. There’s always something to learn.

BMR: Now that you mention Cascadia, that is also a region prone to big earthquakes. What do you think is the difference in the political and societal importance that people in the US and in Japan give to this kind of natural hazards, the similarities and differences?

HT: There are really big differences, I think, because people in Japan experience earthquakes more than almost any other country in the world, certainly in any other very highly populated place. And there have been many earthquake or tsunami disasters. So they understand it as the most important national challenge, in Japan. The US is a big place. Only one part of the US is really subject to much earthquake hazard. We’ve had this magnitude 7, in scale, earthquakes in the… everybody who is alive, right now, in their lifetime, but we haven’t seen the really gigantic ones. Cascadia… It’s pretty clear that the last magnitude 9 scale earthquake was 300 years ago. Before we don’t have any historical record, only Native American people were living there at that time. And they have some oral tradition, but it was not a written culture. So folks who were there then experienced it, but we don’t really know. So as scientists, we have identified the hazard, and I think our government people understands that, and our society understands that, but not in the deep personal, serious way that people in Japan understands it.

In the early days of NanTroSEIZE, I remember talking to Kiyoshi Suyehiro – who is another person we should have mentioned before, key to getting this all started – and I said to Suyehiro-san, “NanTroSEIZE is going to be really expensive.” Chikyu costed… I don’t know how much money to build it, like half a billion dollars at that time, twenty years ago. “Why is the government willing to invest so much?” And this was a time not too long after the US had experienced the 9/11, the World Trade Center bombing, the airplane attack, and everything. And he said, “The way the US feels about terrorism, the national security risk, is the way Japan feels about earthquakes and tsunamis. It is the number one national security hazard.” So I understood that, then. And I think that’s still true. And still in the US we can get some attention, but we can’t really get deep attention of the people who controls the money. At least not as deep as I think would be necessary. Culture is changing somewhat, in the US. If you go to a coastal community along the Washington or Oregon or Northern California, you’ll see the tsunami evacuation signs. Ten years ago those weren’t there. Here (in Japan) you have evacuation towers everywhere. We have the first two towers in the US, actually, just been constructed in the last few years. So we’re developing what we call sometimes an earthquake culture, meaning awareness. And also going past just the level of fear to what can we do to be resilient, to make sure that people mostly survive, and that society is still functioning the day after the earthquake. So we have a long way to go in the USA. Maybe it’s not surprising. We haven’t had the big disaster events at the same scale as here, in Japan. So, you know, I’ve seen it and it becomes a thing where it’s part of my job and also my passion to make people aware of it, find a way to talk about it so it’s not just frightening, but it’s actually going to trigger people to take useful steps.

BMR: How do you see the future of scientific ocean drilling in the US?

HT: The future of scientific ocean drilling is cloudy right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. For the first time since the 1960s, we seemingly don’t have a plan for a scientific ocean drilling program after next year. The JOIDES Resolution has to retire, either right away or not long after. So there’s a crossroads coming. There are a lot of scientists who our career has built up around scientific ocean drilling, around the kinds of science questions you can only answer by having access to drill holes. So I think that that puts pressure on the funding agencies to make sure that it continues. But it’s expensive. Times are different now. I think most countries are not as willing to spend their budget as freely – at least in the US this is true, for sure. So science funding is flat, but costs are going up, that kind of thing. So, I don’t know. I think we have a job to convince the public, and the funding agencies, and Congress in the USA… The administration, that this is one important piece of what we do. Maybe it’s less obvious why it’s important compared to public health, or compared to climate change, when I’m talking about geohazards. But on the other hand, of course climate change is an enormous challenge. But the biggest loss of human life, in a short term, can be coming from geohazards. And also just something about the even more basic things. It’s just like discovery science, understanding how the planet works is fundamentally a good thing to do. And we’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go, especially under the ocean. I’m only semi-optimistic (laughs) just because I know that they see real budget shortfalls, just like in Japan, just like in Europe. But right now we’re in an interesting place. And what has changed in my – not only in my lifetime, maybe just in the past ten years –  is that some things that didn’t used to be political are now political. The climate change, okay, that’s been a political issue for a long time. But other parts of science where I think it used to be conservative, liberal, whatever, people said, “well, science is important in some way. And technology is important.” Now, there seems to be some push that it’s like, it’s just not important. And I think that that’s dangerous for society. So, I don’t know. I hope that some drilling program has to continue if we’re going to have young scientists who are prepared to have careers in this kind of work. And if there’s a gap of ten years, well, there won’t be any young scientists to pick up the job when the ten years is over. So lots of things to worry about right now, I guess. I’m glad we have this… At least some parts of this program are moving forward and we have so many people who are interested and are going to speak up. So that gives me some hope that we will find a way to keep it all going. And the science has to evolve, right? We’re not doing the science that they were doing in 1970 or 1980 or 1990, but there’s still so much to learn and such good proposals. There’re good projects to do.

BMR: There will always be some topics, like geohazards, that will always be important… What’s the thing you value the most, that you have learned in scientific ocean drilling for your life or career?

HT: I’ll give the more philosophical answer. The things that I’ve gotten the most out, that give me satisfaction and that make me feel like we accomplished something, is that it takes many different disciplines to make really interesting scientific advances. So it doesn’t just come from the geophysics, or just the geochemistry, or just the paleontology. The great thing about scientific ocean drilling is all these different specialties come together with one goal, which is understanding some important science question. But we each bring our separate expertise and we work together. So science works by teamwork, and scientific ocean drilling is an embodiment of that. What I’ve learned is that teamwork is the most important thing. Now, what goes along with, is that science is done by real people. And people have personalities. So it’s developed friendship and it’s all about – just like everything else in life. It’s like how to work together really harmoniously with other people. And some scientists are good and bad at different parts of that. But we learn how to work together, or we don’t get anything done. And so those are really… And we don’t get to talk about scientific accomplishments, like we think we understand this or that better now. But in the really big picture, is those things that I take away from several decades of doing this.

BMR: Thank you. Is there something else you want to talk about, to explain, or mention that we haven’t covered?

HT: Maybe one thing just to mention, it’s – this is just going back to think about some of those people that I talked about as my early mentors or influences. I feel really lucky that – I came up one generation later, but my mentors were the people who were around for the dawn of plate tectonics, the invention and the discovery of some of these really basic things. And the ability to spend part of my career knowing Miriam Kastner, and Casey Moore, and Eli Silver, and Gaku Kimura, and Ako (Asahiko) Taira, and so on, it’s really cool. It’s direct contact with some of the foundation of the entire field of science that I work in. And some of those folks are definitely still around. And it’s great. And it doesn’t take very long to go from feeling like the young, early career scientists to people calling you the senior experienced person (laughs), you’re like, “wait, how did that happen?” But that’s just life.